This post isn't about antisemitism

 When I was in elementary school, I was picked on a lot.  The teasing was merciless.  I imagined, at the time it was because my classmates were antisemitic.  Not that I knew the word antisemitism.  But I knew that I was the only girl with curly hair.  (My hair is not just curly.  It's extra curly.) I knew that I had freckles, buck teeth, and towered over the boys.  I knew that most of my clothes were hand me down and I could not run very fast.  I did not go to the same camps, country clubs, or certainly churches as the other children. I did not learn how to push myself to excel at athletics until high school. Thus, I had no particular skills of value in the elementary school economy.  

Being to endure a vast amount of physical pain is not a particularly valuable school in elementary school. I impressed a soccer coach with that skill once.  That's about it.  They didn't test for that skill in the nineties and they certainly don't test for it now a days .  

But I digress. 

I had, what I assume is stronger in those of us with Survivor grandparents.  A shadowy feeling that something horrible once happened.  We read Number the Stars at one point in elementary school and Diary of Anne Frank in middle school. But by middle school, I had switched schools and things were much better.  It is really a remarkable fact that I found middle and high school to be kinder environments than elementary.  

My grandparents were the lucky ones of course.  Born in America and solidly American by the time of the Shoah.  Which led to its own issues in the end.  But BH", not murdered by Nazis.  

It did not help this weird and peculiar fantasy that my mother claimed several of my elementary school classmates parents were "literal Nazis".  

Why- do tell, would you send your Jewish child, (if not fully halachically Jewish) to a Xtian elementary school with children of people who were virulently antisemitic? 

This is but one of the many decisions my mother made that do not hold up in the light of day.  

I've been on earth over three decades and I still have baggage from elementary school.  Still

Envisioning my classmates as the Nazi youth might have been a survival tactic. I don't want to be flippant. I really don't. But what was the other option?  That I was ugly?  Unloveable?  Everyone else was just inherently better than me?  

 I am thirty-two years old and still hurts.  I'm not to terms with this.  And just because I'm religious doesn't mean I have clarity. HaShem forgive me, I hope they suffer for it. 

When I started writing, I was going to make a connection to modern day antisemitism. Something going on in America and Europe.  But I can't now. Yes, I do write in a very stream-of-conscience manner.

I can barely finish this post. 

I didn't realize how deeply I felt about this until right now. I guess this is why I write.  

More to come...